Monthly Archives: February 2014

For 39 days he was held in detention after he had been arrested during a demonstration against Egypt’s new military rulers. He was released last week

But his parents’ were horrified to learn their son said he not only was regularly and viciously beaten during the first few days of his incarceration, but he said he also was sexually assaulted during interrogations.

“They made me and other 10 young men who had been arrested to strip naked when we arrived at Cairo’s Abdeen Police Station; they blindfolded the boys with their own underwear and there were a lot of beatings,” said Fadhy Samir Zakher. “The police used sticks and their fists, and they also kicked the detainees repeatedly.” Return my full VOA report here.

Al-Qaida linked jihadists in insurgent-held areas in northern and eastern Syria are targeting children as young as four-years-old and teenagers for indoctrination, conducting teach-ins, opening schools and training camps, say human rights activists.

“You are seeing the jihadists trying to create a new pool of suicide bombers,” says psychotherapist Mohamed Khalil of the London-based Arab Foundation for Care of Victims of War and Torture. Read my full VOA dispatch here.

In VOA today I explore behind-the-scenes efforts by the West and Saudi Arabia to nudge their favored rebels to adjust to a more southern military strategy in the Syrian civil war — in a shift that analysts say is a bid to strengthen the moderate armed opposition at the expense of hard-line Islamists. Most analysts I spoke to thought this couldn’ be pulled off. Read the article here.

“Of all the world leaders out there today, el-Sisi is perhaps the most like the Russian leader, at least if you take into account their personal beginnings and their respective rises through the ranks of power. And these commonalities could give the West some crucial hints about how el-Sisi—who is expected to declare his presidential bid any day now—might run a post-Arab Spring Egypt, one that has already shown a willingness to engage in warmer relations with Moscow.”